A most dangerous book: Tacitus's Germania from the Roman Empire to the Third Reich

Abstract

The pope wanted it, Montesquieu used it, and the Nazis pilfered an Italian noble's villa to get it: the Germania, by the Roman historian Tacitus, took on life of its own as both an object and an ideology. When Tacitus wrote not-very-flattering little book about the ancient Germans in 98 CE, at the height of the Roman Empire, he could not have foreseen that the Nazis would extol it as a bible, nor that Heinrich Himmler, the engineer of the Holocaust, would vow to resurrect Germany on its grounds. But the Germania inspired-and polarized-readers long before the rise of the Third Reich. In this elegant and captivating history, Christopher B. Krebs, professor of classics at Harvard University, traces the wide-ranging influence of the Germania over five-hundred-year span, showing us how an ancient text rose to take its place among the most dangerous books in the world.

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